Tag Archives: Thanksgiving

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I must have been one of the few children seated at the cousins’ table who didn’t mind eating jellied cranberry sauce from the familiar white, blue and red can. I have fond memories of my mother opening it with her handheld can opener, inserting a knife around the inside to loosen the gelatinous concoction, and the whoosh with which it slid out, shimmering and ridged, onto the plate. My mother was a terrific cook, and I must have reasoned that the least I could do was permit her this one convenience, especially when she stuffed and roasted the turkey at our home in Elyria, and then struggled to secure it in a box to keep warm while my father drove us to my grandmother’s house in Lorain.

Ironically, it was at my grandmother’s—one of the greatest cooks to come to America from Sicily—where I suffered through what I believe to be the most disgusting side dish known to any holiday table: ambrosia, prepared and served with great fanfare by my mother’s sister, who, it must be said, did not inherit the cooking gene. Aunt Helen’s ambrosia looked pretty enough, with its own bright red Jell-O shimmer, but its other ingredient was cottage cheese, something I’ve never liked. I could barely force the stuff down. As I think about it, the canned cranberry sauce was a winner by sheer comparison.

With the passing years, my palate grew more sophisticated. And although I never learned to appreciate my aunt’s culinary effort (the only recipe, actually, that she ever mastered), my disdain for canned cranberry sauce, with its heavy-handed tartness and slightly tinny flavor, finally blossomed into something like hatred.

Give me a dish with layered flavors! Give me subtlety and nuance! Give me, if you will, Ginger Cranberry Sauce. I clipped the recipe from an old Parade magazine article back when the late Sheila Lukins of Silver Palate fame was the food editor. I don’t remember how long ago the recipe was published; but I can no longer remember a Thanksgiving when I didn’t make it. In a line-up of labor-intensive holiday recipes, this is the easiest thing in the world to put together, and it can be made weeks ahead of time. I hope you enjoy it, and I wish you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving!

I can’t help but think that when it comes to Thanksgiving, I’m operating under some sort of jinx. Ten years ago, my divorce was finalized the day before Thanksgiving. I wrote about that experience two years ago on this blog in a post that struck a chord with well more than a thousand readers after being featured on WordPress. The following year, the essay was reprinted on Better After 50, a terrific site for midlifers.

The post addressed the vast changes I grappled with in celebrating a major holiday right on the heels of my divorce, and how, newly remarried, my second husband and I would drive up to Ohio from Virginia, where we had recently moved. Having no home base any longer, we celebrated Thanksgiving in a restaurant. We were with all three of our sons, but it still felt alien to me.

Last year, my husband and I very nearly had to spend the holiday apart; he had just taken on a new job back in Ohio, and I was holding down the fort at our Virginia home, beginning, once again, the rituals of packing and preparing a house to go on the market. John could have had his turkey in the dining area of the Residence Inn, where his company was putting him up; I would have had the better end of the deal: celebrating with our good friends in Richmond. But I flew up for a house-hunting trip, and my future daughter-in-law’s parents kindly invited us to join them for their Thanksgiving. Still, it wasn’t quite the same. This now made two years in a row that I wasn’t able to cook for my favorite food holiday.

So imagine my excitement this year when, finally settled in a charming 84-year-old house near the shores of Lake Erie, I began orchestrating plans for a Thanksgiving meal around my grandmother’s old table. I began to pull out my holiday recipes. I ordered an organic, free-range turkey from our local market. I put a fall wreath on the front door.

Because John’s older son and his fiancé couldn’t rearrange their work schedules, we actually celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas on Friday, November 8, with a homemade lasagna dinner at which all of our boys were present, joined by P’s fiancé and my son’s new bride. It was lovely. And it’s a good thing we had that at least, because two days later, I fell.

We were walking our dog Sunday evening. It was dark. This little deadly was on the sidewalk:

Ohio is the buckeye state. This is a buckeye pod. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Long story short, a trip to the emergency room confirmed my worst fear: I had broken my left foot at the fifth metatarsal. The break, known as a Jones fracture, is an unfortunate one in that these types of fractures take an inordinately long time to heal. Something about diminished blood flow in that part of the foot. The orthopedic surgeon I saw the following day ordered a short-leg plaster cast and absolutely no walking on the foot for at least six weeks. At least the fracture doesn’t require surgery.

Now, let me tell you something about charming old homes that were built in 1929. They do not have first-floor master suites. They typically have only one bathroom, always on the second floor. Homes like ours, which have undergone renovation before we got to them, will have a powder room on the main floor. Ours is an anomaly in that the powder room, for which we’re grateful, can only be accessed by walking down two steps off our kitchen. We must also walk up three steps to enter the back door and two to enter the front. Do you see where I’m going with this? The operative word here is “steps.” Crutches are notoriously dangerous…perhaps as dangerous as buckeye pods. The only way for me to get anywhere vertically in our house is by scooching on my bottom. Unless you work out frequently and have impressive upper body strength (which I don’t), this is not as easy as you would think. Consequently, I have spent nearly three weeks marooned on the second floor of our home.

Here’s where I get to the part about being thankful.

My youngest stepson is enjoying a gap year from college. He has been here every day during the week since my fall, bringing me meals on a tray, walking our dog (carefully), and performing all manner of tasks and errands until my husband returns from work in the evening. In an attempt to help further his education (maybe not much of a deal for him), I’ve taken him on as an intern for my company, teaching him a few PR ropes. He is assisting me with an important project for one of my clients, and quite frankly, I don’t know what I’d do without him. Luckily my office is on the second floor. I tool back and forth from bed to bath and beyond (well, to the office) with this nifty knee scooter.

Zoom-Zoom

My husband is doing the cooking, marketing, also running errands, and tending to me in the most loving way imaginable—all while commuting to work each day. He has the patience of Job.

Our new church has arranged for us to have several home-cooked meals; one new church-friend even dropped by our home with altar flowers to cheer me. Two neighbors have helped me out with a couple of breakfasts when C. wasn’t able to be here in the morning. Members of the blogging community have reached out to me with love and good wishes. The positive energy from all of this could get a city off the grid.

So this Thanksgiving, when I bow my head before the turkey dinner that my husband will have cooked with the help of his youngest son, I know what my blessings are, and what to be thankful for. They are legion, and I am humbled by the generosity and selflessness of others.

But if it’s all right with you, God, I’m going to add a small request during my prayer of thanks: Please. No more broken bones. As You know, because You know everything, this is my third fracture.

Readers, I suppose I’ll have to tell you about those other bad breaks some time. For now, let’s all give thanks for family and friends.

English: Saying grace before carving the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner in the home of Earle Landis in Neffsville, Pennsylvania (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quite a lot has happened on the home front of late—so much, in fact, that I haven’t had a chance to fully process it all, let alone write about it. But on this Thanksgiving Eve, the most important thing I can share with you right now is to tell you that I’m keenly aware of all that I have to be thankful for this year—my husband’s love and the health of my family foremost. I’m writing this from the home I carry with me in my heart, rather than from our physical home. We’ve traveled again this year—to Ohio again this year—and I’ll have more to share with you about that at a later time. For now, I just want to add one more item to the list of things I’m grateful for: Your readership and support. Knowing that you are there, at the other end of the line, as it were, fills me with joy. Because of you, this little blog has grown beyond my wildest imaginings. A Thanksgiving post that I shared with you last year on this site appears today on Better After 50, a weekly online magazine, curated by Felice Shapiro, that was featured in the Boston Globelast month. So thank you, dear readers. Your support, your visits to this site, make a difference. I wish you and your loved ones a very happy, healthy Thanksgiving.

So here I am, on what used to be known as the day after Thanksgiving but is now generally referred to as Black Friday. I’m sitting in my son’s girlfriend’s sweet little house, and we’re chatting, drinking coffee with cream, and marveling at the myriad e-mails stuffing our inboxes—advertisements for deep-discounted this, Black Friday that, and get ‘em before they’re gone whatevers.

Whatever.

I understand—and sympathize with—the fact that many people have a real and serious need in this economy to hit the stores in the wee hours to obtain the best deal possible on Christmas gifts for their families. We’re in that boat, too. But I can’t bring myself to enter a store at midnight. I barely enjoy shopping during normal hours. I suppose this is my age speaking; when I was young, I used to love to shop.

Money is tight. John and I will figure out a creative way to honor our family during the holidays. And we’ve already given each other our Christmas gift: our impromptu trip to New York City. And so I’m just lollygagging, spending time with Jenny while Matt gets ready for work and John catches some extra sleep. I’m drinking coffee and doing something I rarely have time to do: I’m relaxing. This is a free day, and we’re 500 miles from home. We’ll meet some friends for lunch and more friends at dinner—friends that we haven’t seen in more than a year. There will be no shopping involved. And I’m fine with this. I suspect it might even be good for us in ways other than our wallets.

TIME magazine, in its issue for June 24, 2011, published a fascinating series of articles about money. In J.D. Roth’s article, “Money Can’t Buy Happiness—Or Can It?” he writes:

Experiences tend to make us happier than material things. We have different reactions to the money we spend on experiences and the money we spend on material goods: When we spend on experiences, our perceptions are magnified (meaning we feel happier or sadder than when we spend on stuff), and the feelings tend to linger longer. And since most of our experiences are positive, spending on activities instead of things generally makes us happier.

This I believe: Money can’t buy you love, and it can’t buy you happiness. I am programmed to believe this because I grew up never having much of it. I’m inclined to believe this because I did find love and I did find happiness, two critically important factors to a good quality of life. John says that he’s never possessed so little materialistically since the days early in his adulthood when he was teaching elementary school—and he’s never been happier. The same is true for me. We clip coupons, scrimp, and do without things that have turned out to be wholly unnecessary to our well-being. But time spent with our family is vital to our well-being, and so this trip to Ohio will fuel us with happiness far longer than an iPad would for me, or a summer of Sundays playing golf would for John.

Now, if I could no longer afford coffee, then we’d have a real problem …

Like this:

After ten hours, 500 miles, and four rest stops—with Sandy, our Cavalier King Charles spaniel alternating between a perch at the back of our RAV IV and my lap—John and I arrived safely in Ohio. We’re staying with my son and his lovely Jenny, whom we haven’t seen since May. It feels wonderful to be here. The kids cooked us a delicious pasta dinner, and we walked all three dogs (they have two) by Lake Erie, across the street from where they live. The air was crisp, and the clear sky was full of stars.

Tomorrow will be the first time John’s sons and mine will be together since our wedding 15 months ago. It’s late, and we’re all tired, so this will be all I have time to write tonight.

The turkey was not ready for his close-up. Never in a million years would I have dreamed that the humble bird from our early Christmas with my husband’s sons would, a year later, appear on thousands of computer screens around the world. How’d this happen? Yesterday, the WordPress editor (aka “story wrangler”) plucked this little blog out of obscurity and plopped it onto the site’s “Freshly Pressed” portal—where all good bloggers go to log in. In roughly 27 hours, more than 4,000 people visited The Midlife Second Wife, and 42 new subscribers signed up. The post that generated all of the activity, “Where’s Home for the Holidays When You’re Divorced or Remarried?” attracted 83 comments and 109 “likes” from bloggers. Gosh. I really wish I’d garnished that turkey.

But this post isn’t about our turkey’s less than glamorous visage, and it’s only tangentially about the blog’s 15-minutes of fame. No, this post is about gratitude. The past 27 hours have been wonderfully overwhelming and deeply humbling. So I hope that you won’t mind if I use this essay to express some well-deserved thanks.

To my son, who e-mailed me before all of the hubbub began, to tell me that he loved the post. Matthew, I’m sorry, but I’m about to have an “I’m going to embarrass you moment.” I love and admire you more than words can say.

To my husband, who was the first to comment, who gives me room and space to write, who champions everything that I do, and who—to quote Paul Child, Julia’s husband—”is the butter to my bread and the breath to my life.” John, I love you.

To my stepsons, whom I love more than they might realize, given the brief time we’ve been flung together and the distance that separates us.

To the editors at WordPress for incredible support of a late-blooming blogger.

To all of my friends and family who signed on at the beginning. You are amazing and I love you.

To every new reader of the blog—all of you who subscribed, felt moved enough by the post to give it your much-appreciated thumbs-up, and decided to follow me on Twitter.

To everyone who posted their comments in response to the blog’s message. You have no idea how you have warmed my heart. Many of you wrote to express your own painful experiences about the way divorce has torn your family asunder; many described your own ways of dealing with the holidays; one reminded me—and I hope everyone reading—that it’s not only divorce or remarriage that can shunt holiday traditions sidewise. The wars in which our country has been embroiled have done their own damage—in countless cases irreparable—to the family gathering at the dinner table. One of you wrote to express your poignant wish that you had the right to marry, too. So do I.

To each of you who took the time to post a comment, I promise to reply. It will take me some time to do so, but it’s important to me. You have done me a great honor by your response to my writing.

To all of you reading this, I promise to make every effort to be interesting, honest, and useful in what I post here. Your time is valuable; I don’t want you to feel you are wasting it by reading me.

Finally, there’s just one more thing I want to say before I leave you today.

I’ve yet to share on this blog my love of French films. I bring this up now because there’s a wonderful line in one of my favorites—Red, part of Krzysztof Kieslowski‘s trilogy Three Colors. The character portrayed by Irene Jacob says:

Je me sens quelque chose d’important se passe autour de moi. (Don’t be impressed; I had to look this up on Google Translate.)

“I feel something important is happening around me.”

For the past several weeks, I have felt as though something important were happening around me. (I’ve felt this way before, when John and I fell in love … when my child was first placed in my arms.) It’s an incredibly potent feeling—a feeling of great positivity and light. My Thanksgiving wish for each and every one of you is this: that you experience this feeling at least once in your lives.

The turkey I prepared in 2010, when my stepsons celebrated an early Christmas with us.

When my first marriage ended, the day before Thanksgiving in 2003, I took a deep breath upon returning from court and began meal preparations for my first major holiday on my own. I set myself (and my raw nerves) to the comforting task of marinating pears for a compote, then started on the bread-sage stuffing. Why? Because for as long as I can recall, I’ve cooked elaborate dinners for the holidays.

During my first marriage, our family shared hosting duties for the holidays, but the times when it wasn’t my turn didn’t mean I was off the hook. I contributed side dishes and desserts to the groaning board so the burden of cooking an entire meal wasn’t borne by the host. That, however, was all in the past. My son would join me, and my cousin, for my first post-divorce Thanksgiving. That was it. Taking the smallest turkey I’d ever roasted out of the oven, I marveled at its lightness. And cried.

One month later, at Christmas, I said goodbye to all that and performed a variation on the theme. My cousin brought her nephew, my son came with his girlfriend at the time, and I rounded out the rest of the table with a young violinist from the Ukraine, who was studying at the conservatory where I worked. She brought her mother along. And, for the first time in my entire life, turkey was not featured on the table. Instead I prepared a standing rib roast from one of Ina Garten‘s Barefoot Contessa cookbooks.

This was my new family dynamic, and the start of a new tradition.

It can’t have been easy for my son, who at the time was in his early 20s. He was now required to divide all of his holidays in two; the first half of the day was spent with his father, the latter half with me. Those mornings and early afternoons dragged on so! It seemed strange to be alone in the house on a holiday. I probably hugged him far too long and far too tightly when he arrived. But so it went, each year, until the year I remarried.

My new husband had taken a job in Virginia, and I was now living nearly 500 miles from where I grew up and lived my entire life—and 500 miles from my son. Whereas holidays had presented a mere logistical inconvenience, now the geographical stakes were raised to challenging heights. Would I be able to spend at least one holiday with him? And what of my husband’s sons? How and when would we see them? The oldest is in graduate school in Illinois; the youngest had just started college in Ohio.

As it turned out, I wasn’t able to see my son at all that first year after our move. His work schedule simply didn’t allow him enough time off to make the trip. I cannot tell you how that rocked me. Things fared a bit better with the other boys; they drove to Virginia the second week of December to have an early Christmas with us. But again, what orbits they had to navigate! The eldest and his girlfriend drove from Illinois to Ohio to spend time with his mother and brother. Then, with his brother in tow, he drove from Ohio to Virginia. Then it was back around and up to Ohio to drop his brother off, and westward to St. Louis, so his girlfriend could see her family. And back to Illinois. It was like a 1930s movie, where a map of the United States with moving, dotted arrows illustrated a character’s travel progression from Point A to Point Whatever. The mind reels.

Last year, John and I decided that it was our turn to give the kids a break and do the driving. We left for Ohio early in the morning the day before Thanksgiving. Once there, we stayed with my son and his girlfriend. John’s sons joined us the next day, and we all enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner together in a suburb of Cleveland. In a restaurant. For Thanksgiving.

That took some getting used to. Never in my life had I set foot in a restaurant on a major holiday; it went against every cooking and baking gene in my body. I had always felt nothing but sadness for Ralphie and his family in A Christmas Story, forced to eat Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant after the Bumpus hounds devoured their turkey.

The meal was traditional enough and tasty enough, I suppose. But that was hardly the point. The goal was to be together: one scattered family gathered for a few brief hours around a table laden with food that might (or might not) allow us (allow me?) to pretend we were in the old homestead, however new that homestead might be.

It was more than enough that we were together and healthy.

It’s true, as the old song says, that there’s no place like home for the holidays. But when you create a new family, and circumstances toss your family hither and yon with no viable base of operations, it helps to remember another song—one that can serve to brighten your thoughts with a clarity that allows comfort and joy to shine through: